Monster Nation

by David Wellington

  Not a chance.

  They brought her another meal—pork chops—a little later. She ate them, of course, but they didn’t really taste of anything. She was still sucking little bits of the grayish-pinkish meat out from between her teeth when the lights went out.

  Oh God, she thought. They didn’t know that she didn’t sleep. Or maybe they did know and they just wanted to torment her, to force her to abide by a normal human day/night schedule. But then the room’s emergency lights came on, a pair of wan halogen bulbs tucked away in a corner of the ceiling.

  Nilla stood up and tried to reach the door, intending to signal to her captors that something was wrong. The chain wouldn’t let her reach, though.

  Hello, lass, Mael said, startling her. She looked to her left. He was reclining on top of one of the cafeteria tables. Naked, hairy, tattooed. He looked out of place in the Olde English Pub, to put it mildly.

  “You—what did you,” Nilla sputtered. She looked up at the emergency lights and then back at her benefactor.

  He winked in reply.

  Chapter Nine

  It’s growing… the mass is growing, on its own… so like a cancer but… coherent, self-organizing… so beautiful… Happy Valentine’s Day, love. Maybe… maybe this won’t be the last. [Lab Notes, 2/14/04]

  Clark clipped the NODs over his face and switched them on. Peering out through a four-inch-wide window he could make out a little of what was happening. Out by the main gate of the prison a crowd of survivors had gathered. They were beating on the gate with their fists, their mouths wide with shouts and pleas that he couldn’t hear. Someone was screaming—a real, in extremis scream—but it was far away and it didn’t trigger his fear reactions. It sounded like someone was watching a slasher film on a television in another room. “We let them in, of course,” he said, because Horrocks had asked him what the soldiers at the gates should do. “They don’t have a chance out there on their own.”

  Horrocks hurried away, taking his troops with him, leaving Clark alone in the observation balcony above the interrogation rooms. He could still hear the screaming.

  Calm. He had to stay cool, calm, collected. The prison’s emergency generators were up and running. Lighting in the corridors and pods was at a reduced level but it was holding up.

  The first thing to do was to establish a secure perimeter.

  Easy. The supermax prison was one of the most hardened facilities on the continent. He remembered assistant warden Glynne’s introduction to the place. There were ten thousand doors in Florence-ADX, he’d been informed, and all of them could be remotely controlled.

  There was a master shutdown switch in the operations room. Simple. Get everyone inside that he could, save as many of the people from the shantytown as possible, then hit the switch. Seal the prison off. Then he could worry about why the power had gone out. Then he could worry about what happened next.

  Get to the operations room, and hit the master shutdown switch.

  Easy.

  He forced himself to start walking.

  He flipped open his phone and dialed for Vikram. Told his old friend to meet him in the Ops Room. He had a feeling they should stick together at this point. He called the Civilian as well but got no response. Made another call, to the MP station, told them to secure the girl. He had a sneaking feeling she had something to do with the power outage. Why? Why did he think that? She was chained to a wall—she could hardly have sabotaged the prison’s main generators from inside the Pub. Then again, why had he thought she would be able to tell him anything about the Epicenter? He’d been so sure of her key role in the Epidemic, but for the life of him, he couldn’t have explained why. Just a feeling, a gut feeling.

  He’d made a lot of mistakes and gotten a lot of people killed for his gut feeling. It was time to get rational again. To think like an engineer again.

  Fine. Logic. Logic dictated that the generators hadn’t gone down on their own. Logic dictated that the prison was under attack. He could still hear screaming. Was it closer?

  Vikram was already in the Ops Room when he arrived, looking concerned, his beard matted to one side where he’d probably been sleeping on it. He had a sidearm strapped to his belt. Clark’s hand involuntarily went to his own weapon.

  “The troops are letting in the people from outside. The story they tell is not good,” Vikram told him. The Major started up one of the computers. It would drain emergency power but not much of it and it would let them see what was going on. Vikram called up some views from surveillance cameras around the facility. The main courtyard was clear, swept by searchlights that showed nothing. The helipad on the roof looked fine.

  The western fence was mobbed by the dead.

  Their faces were blanks in the low-light view, their hands pale blobs that picked and tore at the barbed wire. Clark couldn’t see their wounds or their blank expressions but he recognized instantly the way that they moved, the slow, remorseless march, the dragging but unrelenting way their arms lifted and fell and pulled and ripped and beat.

  “Where did they come from? How did they gather so quickly? We expected a few of them at a time, not an army. The dead don’t surge, Vikram. The dead don’t surge. That takes conscious planning.” Which normally they didn’t have. Yet they’d shown some measure of it when they escaped the detention facility in Denver. The girl locked down in the pub showed plenty of it herself.

  This was a directed attack. A raid.

  “Get some men with crew-served weapons up on that wall. I don’t think the infected can get through the wire but I don’t want to give them time to try.” Clark rubbed at his face. “Get the Stryker crews mobilized, I want to cut this off from the rear before it can turn into something significant. Are all of the survivors inside the gate?”

  Vikram peered into a computer monitor and puffed out his cheeks before answering. “Yes. All of them that still live. They say the dead attacked their shantytown, first.”

  That would explain the screaming. It was definitely closer now.

  “Fine.” Clark went to a boxy terminal bolted to the wall by the door of the room. It looked like an antique next to the ruggedized laptops and industrial strength cabling that Vikram had installed in the Ops Room. It was the control terminal for all of the prison’s facilities and systems. Clark booted it up and paged through a main menu until he found what he wanted: !!!EMERGENCY LOCKDOWN!!!

  “Step away from that door,” he called. Vikram was a good ten feet from it but he stepped away anyway, like a good soldier. Clark hit the ENTER key and an alarm sounded throughout the entire prison for two seconds. Moving silently on electromagnetic servos the door swung shut and clicked three times. It was locked tight. The clicking seemed to go on for minutes as nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine other doors throughout the facility shut themselves and locked automatically.

  For a long time Vikram and Clark just looked at each other and waited for something to go wrong. Nothing did.

  “There. We’re safe,” Clark announced. “Now we just have to decide what to do next.”

  The two second alarm sounded again and the door of the Ops Room ghosted open.

  Clark’s heart started beating very fast. Too fast.

  “Bannerman,” Vikram began, but Clark held up a hand for patience.

  He studied the terminal in front of him. He hadn’t touched anything. He called up an activity log and saw that nine seconds after he’d given the order to lock the prison down, someone else had given the order to release the doors again. All of the doors, including all the gates. Even the exterior gates. There was nothing to stop anyone or anything from just walking into the prison.

  It could have been a glitch but of course, it wasn’t.

  There were security terminals all over the prison, and any one of them could have undone Clark’s lockdown but it wasn’t just a case of someone pushing a random button on a terminal. It wasn’t just a simple matter of a few keystrokes to undo an emergency lockdown in the system. It required someone t
o input an authorization code and then to manually set all the prison’s systems to “all clear”. You had to know how to do it and you couldn’t do it accidentally. Clark checked the activity log again.

  “Someone’s in the infirmary. Someone who wants the doors open.”

  Vikram chewed nervously on his lower lip until it looked red and sore. “Perhaps,” he said, his eyes very wide, “perhaps we should go there and discuss this with them.”

  It was the worst idea Clark had ever heard. He couldn’t think of anything else to do. “Right,” he nodded. He removed his weapon from its holster.

  Chapter Ten

  Mars is a snowball, Venus a boiling pot of sulfuric acid. Everywhere we look in the universe we find sterile rocks and dust but not here… Earth is special, a special case. Lovelock’s hypothesis is all but proved, life regulates itself, but through what agency or process? The morphogenetic field… the field is real, it’s real and it can be manipulated. [Lab Notes, 2/15/04]

  “What the hell are you doing here?”

  Mael Mag Och raised his hands in mock exasperation. “Saving your skin, lass. You got yourself in a bit of a pickle, didn’t you? That big fellow, the one with the vaccine, he was going to do your head in. So I did the only thing I could, which was to bring you here. Now I’m making it possible for you to get out of this place. Show me some kindness, lass. Show your best friend in the wide dark world a bit of love, won’t you?”

  “I almost talked my way out of here on my own. I could have, if you’d given me a chance.” Nilla pulled and tugged at the chain that secured her to the wall but there was no give in it at all. She tried folding her hand, touching her pinky to her thumb, but still it wouldn’t fit through the manacle around her wrist. “Now they’ll probably just shoot me because they assume I’m the one who cut the lights.”

  Mael Mag Och swung his legs over the side of the table and got to his feet. He walked behind the bar as he spoke to her. “I’m here to rescue you, lass, but that’s not the only reason I came winging to your side in this dank and fetid prison. This soldier of yours is against us, and he’s a smart one.”

  “You’re afraid of him?” Nilla asked. It was impossible. But if it was true…

  Mael laughed. He ran one hand over the bar as if he were wiping it with a rag. “He’s not a threat. Our victory is assured. He could set back my plans by a few weeks, perhaps, if he put his shoulder to the right wheel.”

  Nilla strained against the manacle. It started to come off but it looked like it might take the skin of her hand with it. Jesus, that would suck, she thought. When you were dead you had to be careful about these things. “How did you manage this, anyway? Is Dick around here somewhere bashing in electrical panels with his face?”

  “Dick’s close by, but no, lass, this was an inside job.”

  She sat down and tried to relax. She had gotten herself out of bondage before. At the hospital, back when she thought she was still alive, she had crawled out of four point restraints. She looked at the manacle. Studied it. Maybe… maybe if she twisted her hand thusly while tugging gently, like so… “An inside job? You were able to infiltrate somebody dead into this place?”

  ”Oh, ho, lass, now that would be a treat of a thing to do. Yet perhaps not all my good servants are dead, hmm? At least, they don't all start out that way.”

  “I hate it when you get all cryptic,” Nilla told him, her eyes narrowing. The manacle fell to the floor with a noisy crash. She was free.

  The Hindu notion of the oversoul is obsessing me today, it sounds so much like the photon monobloc. Everywhere and everywhen, eternal and omnipresent, creating of itself a new definition of time and space. Roasted a chicken tonight for dinner, though she wouldn’t take any. I saved the bones… has it really come to that? I suppose it has. [Lab Notes, 3/16/04]

  The dead came lumbering through the halls of Florence-ADX and they devoured whatever crossed their path. Soldiers, unable to get their weapons up in time. Survivors, defenseless, who could only raise their arms across their faces, who could only crouch down, trying to make themselves small, trying to get away.

  Sergeant Horrocks lead a surgical counter-offensive deep into the heart of the prison, looking for a defensible position from which to start pushing back the enemy. He had twenty years of experience running raids and building firebases. He set up barricades of heavy furniture, filing cabinets, anything that wasn’t bolted down. He designated free fire zones and detailed squads to maintain various positions and hold them to the end.

  Clark listened to the preparations on his cell phone as he and Vikram crossed the prison from one end to the other, headed for the infirmary. “Will they stand a chance, do you think?” Vikram asked. He had his pistol in his hand, low but ready.

  “These kids are young but Rumsfeld plugged them right into hell in Iraq with nothing but the uniforms on their backs and they made it. They up-armored their own vehicles and they wrote whole new chapters in the book on guerilla warfare. If anyone on earth can survive this, it’s my company.” Clark gritted his teeth at the thought of not being beside them. It was no foolish urge toward heroism, but instead a deeply inculcated and endlessly reiterated desire to protect his troops. No officer could function without that drive. He forced himself to accept that by securing the prison terminals and locking the doors down he was serving a higher purpose than he would if he waded into the fray and got himself killed.

  Of course if he couldn’t go to help the troops, he couldn’t ask them to come assist him, either. Clark and Vikram were on their own.

  “It’s just up there,” he said, drawing to a stop a dozen yards from the infirmary. What he expected to find inside he just didn’t know.

  That was no way to run an operation. He gestured for Vikram to head down a side passage, to a side door. A classic flanking maneuver. The Sikh Major nodded his understanding. For all of Clark’s failures it was good to know that one person on the planet still trusted him implicitly. He watched Vikram Singh Nanda’s turban disappear around a corner of the hallway and then he pushed forward to the open door of the infirmary himself.

  Inside long shadows lay draped across a double line of beds. Over each cot a set of ballistic nylon restraints hung down from the ceiling, the buckles undone, the Velcro catches dangling open. The aisle between the beds was packed with wheeled carts full of supplies and equipment. The far end of the room was an enclosed space walled in glass—an intensive care unit. Clark thought he saw some motion there. He kept low, crouched down to avoid anything that might jump out and try to devour his face.

  Something was definitely moving behind the glass. Clark found the door of the ICU room, found the brushed aluminum handle, tried pulling down on it. It started to move, gratingly, but then stopped. Out of ten thousand open doors he’d found the only one that was locked.

  Or perhaps barred. He slowly straightened up to his full height, intending to peek through the glass and see what was obstructing the handle.

  An intercom unit squealed into life. “Hey there, wonk,” the Civilian said.

  Clark slipped the safety back on his pistol. He stood up and looked at his patron through the glass. The DoD man looked pale but unhurt. The Civilian’s sudden appearance had surprised Clark, but it shouldn’t have. The ICU looked like it would stand up to undead attack pretty well. If you were going to hide somewhere it made a great choice.

  “I’m glad to see you’re safe. I tried to call you,” Clark suggested.

  “Yeah. I was busy.” The Civilian turned around and went to sit on a surgical table. “Have you got anything to eat?”

  Clark frowned a little. Why was the Civilian wearing a hospital gown? And what was wrong with his wrists? They were wrapped in thick gauze. Had he tried to commit suicide in some oxycontin-fueled haze? “We’ll sort out provisions later. Right now I need to lock down the prison. I’m assuming you were the one who overrode my original attempt.”

  “I’d congratulate you on your detective work if you, me and Singh Nan
da weren’t the only ones with the authorization code.” He studied Clark’s face. “Yeah, this is going to be a hard sell, but you and me, we’re loyalty oath types, right? Tried and true, red state good old folks to the core. So when I tell you the doors have to stay open you’ll just get in line behind me.”

  “I’m not sure you understand. People are dying here, right now. Every second those doors are open somebody else dies.”

  Instead of answering the Civilian stared hard into Clark until he felt as if he was pinned in place, transfixed by that gaze. He tried to laugh it off, surely this was just some trick, some kind of hypnotist’s trick but laughing didn’t help. Clark had trouble breathing. He tried clawing at his uniform collar but it didn’t help. He had a hard time standing up. Unable to really stop himself, he fell down on the floor, hard.

  “I’m inside of your head, Bannerman. He told me there were incentives and wow, did he not lie. This is so goddamned cool.”

  “He? He who?” Clark gasped.

  “This dead Scottish guy. His name wouldn’t mean anything to you. He’s like, the C-in-C of the dead or something, and I’m going to be his SecDef. Pretty cool, huh? He taught me how to do this to you.”

  The Civilian’s eyes were lit up like two lighthouses spearing out light at Clark through a sudden fog that had come up out of nowhere, a buzzing, rattling fog that got inside his head, he couldn’t think, he couldn’t, he couldn’t stand up there was nothing, there was nothing in the world except those eyes, those glowing eyes and the Civilian’s voice…

  “I literally have the power to cloud your mind, do you get it? It’s easy. It’s the easiest thing I ever did and you have no defense against it. I’m squeezing your life energy right now, that’s all. I’m cutting off the force that makes you alive. This is what dying feels like.”

  Instantly the fog was gone. The Civilian looked as he always had and the room, while dimly lit, was clear of haze.

  “Okay. I think this contest is over, and I think I got a mandate. Do you want a recount, Bannerman?”